Last week's leak was correct: Apple will ship Snow Leopard on 28 August.
Apple's online store last week put up a page listing Mac OS X 10.6's "available" date as the 28th. The company quickly spotted the sudden change and reverted the date to simply "September".
Now the press release is ready and approved by management, and …

COMMENTS

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"PowerPC machines aren't supported"

Which is why the machine I'm typing this on (dual G5 PowerMac) is now running Ubuntu Linux. Still faster than the Intel thingy the guy next to me is using, and it has a far better screen. Apple keyboards are utter crap though.

No PowerPC

"You'll also need an Intel-based Mac. PowerPC machines aren't supported, and even Rosetta Stone, the Intel-based PowerPC emulator that's been part of OS X for a while now becomes an optional install with the debut of 10.6"

$29 - £25, well there's a surprise!

@Annihilator

Nah, stripping out the PowerPC code has just made room for the 64bit code. They're still supporting two instruction sets, it's just Intel 32bit and Intel 64bit now rather than Intel 32bit and PowerPC 32/64bit.

The space savings seem to be related to cheap wins like stripping localisations and applying file system compression to bits of the OS where it makes sense and to proper hard fought wins like the Quicktime rewrite and all the other bits of code consolidation and optimisation. Having spent 8 years desperately trying to announce hundreds of new features in each version, it's not surprising they've accumulated some bloat.

box set

But I don't want iLife or iWork :( My mac mini is used as an sql server and web server for a small business, as well as being used as a media player connected to a TV. I don't really want to upgrade from 10.4, but more and more new apps require 10.5 as a minimum.

@ThomH

Have rethought my comment - why on earth would it INSTALL two versions when only one is needed. Fair enough, the installation disc can contain them, but to put it on the hard disk is beyond me. So I'm retracting my initial suggestion!

If they are indeed installing all the fruit required for any and all architectures, well then words will fail me :-)

@UK Prices

@ThomH

Full-on Intel32/Intel64/PPC32/PPC64 was one of the major things of 10.5. (And, with the unix subsystem in 10.4). So yes, part of the 6GB is indeed from jettisoning an entire half of the executable code. I wager this makes the optional Rosetta support rather heavy, as it means installing both PPC sections back (Unlike the 68K->PPC transition of System 7, PPC can't call intel or vice versa, 32bit can't call 64bit or vice versa) of the OS and frameworks, but not the utilities.

Tiger upgrades

@Blain Hamon

No, 10.5 has 64bit Cocoa but no 64bit applications. If you don't believe me, drop to the console and type "otool -f /Applications/Calculator.app/Contents/MacOS/Calculator" — it'll list two architectures. Not four, two. Ditto for everything else supplied with the OS. Then, to complete the proof, hit command+i in the Finder and verify that those same apps are universal. So they at least have PowerPC and Intel code.

Furthermore, the actual executable code tends to be a tiny part of the supplied apps. Mail.app (the largest supplied application) is 298mb in total, of which less than 10mb is executable and the other 279mb is 'Resources' stuff (tiffs, localisations, etc). iTunes (current version) is 26mb executable, 130.7mb resources. iChat is 6.3mb executable, 108.2mb resources. And so on, and so forth.

The entire /System/Library/Frameworks (where Cocoa, etc live) is only 1.7gb. If you reduced Cocoa/etc to zero, you'd still save less than a third of the 6gb. If you chop it by the half you seem to be expecting, even that's only 0.85gb. So far from being "where the 6gb comes from" as you claim.

Pwned?

The PPC support gives them an extra chance of finding a number of types of bugs that have a long history of hiding on x86 architecture. Dropping the PPC means those bugs won't be seen. Part of what made early OS X so bug free was that it had been developed with both x86 (from Next who were rumored to build for the 68K as well) and PPC. The result of them dumping PPC will mean lots of unhappy customers and more exploits than they have ever seen.